12122008-md-hr-10

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Mail Today, Friday, December 12, 2008

COMMENT

Pak must follow up on the ban on JuD THE UN Security Council must be commended for imposing sanctions on Jamaatud Dawa (JuD), the organisation that Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) morphed into after it was banned in 2002. And the Pakistan government deserves credit for acting on the sanctions and promptly banning the organisation. The international sanctions will grant the Pakistan government legitimacy to crack down on the militant outfits functioning under the guise of JuD without being seen as giving in to pressure from India. Pakistan must now ensure that the ban achieves the objective of dismantling terrorist infrastructure. It served no purpose when LeT was banned in 2002, as JuD emerged as the charity front under whose patronage Pakistani terrorists continued their agenda. Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, the head of JuD and one of the four people the UN has imposed sanctions on for plotting the Mumbai attack, denied any linkage between the Lashkar and the Jamaat. US officials, on the other hand, say that Saeed is still the overall leader of Lashkar. India and the international community will have to closely monitor the concrete steps Pakistan now takes and sustain the pressure on its government. The civilian government also needs international support to check elements from within the Army and the ISI undermining its authority. Since the proxy terror organisations have been created by the ISI, there would surely be attempts to go soft on them or to let them branch out under some other name. The first thing Pakistan needs to ensure is to cut all sources of funds to JuD, seize their weapons and snap the supply line of weapons in the future. With growing international pressure and UN sanctions, the time is ripe for the civilian government to weed out the problem that has also been its bane of late. The action will have popular support if implemented with the message that it is the right move for Pakistan to make. The civilian government must convince people that the reputation of Pakistan is at stake and the country cannot survive if the entire international community turns its back on it. Also, India is terribly hurt and angry. It would not be satisfied with mere cosmetic gestures. The perpetrators of the massacre in Mumbai and other terror incidents should be brought to justice and care must be taken to ensure that such horrors are not repeated anywhere in the world. The world has spoken; now Pakistan needs to show that it can act decisively.

Too young for it EVEN as grown-ups vicariously experienced horror and fear through the live coverage of the Mumbai attacks, they seem to have overlooked the impact that images of blood, gunfire and explosions could have on young impressionable minds. But a couple of weeks on, reports say many children have found it difficult to come to terms with the horrific events of late November, showing grave signs of anxiety, aloofness and even aggression. Psychiatrists say many may show no outward signs of disturbance but could harbour trauma inside their minds. This could have a lasting impact on their personality and world view. Let’s be clear on one simple fact: notwithstanding what Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi might think — he wants terror education included in school curricula — knowledge of terrorism is not like sex education that needs to be imparted to children to help them cope with life. It’s obviously not possible to keep children cocooned when bombs are going off in the city but the exposure can be regulated. Guardians must limit the access children have to television at such times. Second, they must try and explain the events without traumatising children or filling them with hate, thereby helping them overcome their fears and apprehensions through counselling, even professional if necessary. The phenomenon also provides another reason why media companies must work out a code for coverage of unusual happenings. They have been right to turn down the government’s directive about what must be broadcast and what is a no-no for that impinges on their right to report on events. But one reason why the government gets a pretext to get proactive on the issue is that media companies have not sat together and hammered out the do’s and don’ts of such broadcast. Let the attacks change that.

Cut specious logic on terror T

HERE are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India, The economic disparities are startling, and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig.” That was Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation offering insta-advice on the Mumbai terrorist attacks. This was printed on Nov 27th in the International Herald Tribune as the terrorist attacks were going on and even before the identity of the terrorists was known. It was not just Christine Fair who had such sound bytes. Maria Mishra wrote in the Times, “The extreme poverty of many Muslims in India, whose status, according to a recent report, was below that of the ‘Untouchable’ caste of Hindus, has increased frustration.” This untouchables meme was carried forward by Asra Q. Nomani in an oped in Los Angeles Times. Appearing on Larry King, Deepak Chopra declared, “We cannot, if we do not appease and actually recruit the help of this Muslim world, we’re going to have a problem on our hands.” As per these experts, poverty of Indian Muslims, the institutional discrimination and lack of appeasement caused terrorists belonging to Laskhar-e-Taiba to take a boat from Karachi, land in Mumbai, and shoot indiscriminately at Indians and Westerners in railway stations, five star hotels, and hospitals. The second category of experts had the Hindu right to blame. If only the Gujarat riots and demolition of Babri Masjid had not happened, such ill fate would not have fallen on India, they claimed. Most prominent among them was Martha Nussbaum, who wrote in an oped in Los Angeles Times about the Gujarat riots and the attacks on Christian churches skilfully ignoring other violent incidents in India like the rampage of the Congress party on Sikhs following Indira Gandhi's assassination or the Naxalite terrorism rampant in many states. These two theories fail to convincingly explain the Mumbai attacks: why did the terrorists murder Americans, Britons, and Israelis? They also ignore the elephant in the room — the stated goals of Lashkar-eTaiba. There is, hence, a need to balance these by certain obvious points which have been left out during the sound byte generation.

Omissions The image, presented by both these categories of commentators, is of an India resembling the Europe of the Crusades while it is so far from the truth. The great Indian middle class is approximately 300 million strong, which means that about 700 million Indians are not doing so well. The entire Muslim population in India is around 150 million and so the oft repeated claim that Muslims alone are not getting the share of India's prosperity does not stand. India, the land of contradictions, mocks generalisations. It is the country where Azim Premji can be one of the richest people, Shah Rukh Khan, one of the highest paid actors, and A. R. Rahman, the most sought after music composer. It is also the country where Dr. A. P. J Abdul Kalam, who was responsible for India's missile programme and the 1998 nuclear tests, can become the President of India. These people are never mentioned because it upsets pet theories. The coalition government that is in power in Delhi currently consists of two Muslim parties — the Indian Union Muslim League, a party formed “with an object of achieving the constitutional rights of Muslims, other backward and minority

by Jayakrishnan Nair people of India” and All India Majlis- e -Ittehadul Muslimeen which means All India Council of United Muslims. Muslim sensitivities have played an important role in Indian foreign policy since Independence to the Iraq war. A profound example is the relationship with Israel. In 1947 Albert Einstein, who had declined an offer to be Israel's President, wrote a letter to the Prime Minister designate of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, asking for support in establishing a Jewish state. Nehru wrote back saying that he was aware of the Jewish suffering, but did not like the idea of building a nation on Palestinian land. He also wrote that due to the large Muslim minority and the support required from Arab and Muslim states in the fight against Pakistan, he could not support Israel. Since the start of the Iraq war, there was pressure on India to send troops. The war, which was unpopular in India, was unanimously deplored by the Lok Sabha. Still President Bush spoke to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee about how much he would “love to have Indian troops in Iraq.” The nation, as well as the ruling NDA administration, was divided on this issue but after a Cabinet Committee on Security meeting in July 2003, India rejected the American request. In his statement, India's Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha mentioned “our concern for the people of Iraq, our long-standing ties with the gulf region as a whole” for staying away. In short, India did not want to be seen as an occupational force among Muslim nations.

Motive As the dead bodies were being cleared from the Taj, Nariman House and CST, it became evident that supporting the Palestinian cause, show-

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ering Yasser Arafat with various Nehru/Gandhi awards, and keeping away from Iraq did not differentiate us from the Americans, British, and Israelis. Also, as terrorists sprayed bullets at CST and Metro Cinema, they did not exclude Muslims for whose cause they claimed they were fighting. In an interview with a TV station, two Mumbai terrorists mentioned Gujarat and Babri Masjid, among a list of other events against which they were reacting. Though they were trying to sound like Indians, these terrorists were not desperate Indian Muslims, but members of a Pakistani terrorist group banned by India and United States. In a letter sent to the media, the terrorists stated they were avenging the atrocities committed by Hindus against the Muslims since 1947, much before Babri Masjid and Gujarat, and would stop only after each incident had been accounted for.

Reality To understand why any future Deepak Chopra style appeasement will fail against such terrorists, one has to look at “Ideologies of South Asian Jihadi Groups,” written by Husain Haqqani, the current Pakistani Ambassador to the United States. The section on Laskar- e Taiba lists United States, Israel and India as enemies of Islam and their goal for jihad is to “to eliminate evil and facilitate conversion to and practice of Islam.” They would like to wrest control of not just a small part of India, but “All of India, including Kashmir, Hyderabad, Assam, Nepal, Burma, Bihar and Junagadh”, since they were all part of the Muslim empire. While India is not involved in Iraq, it is actively involved in Afghanistan, not as an occupier, but as a partner financing irrigation projects in Northwest Afghanistan, power projects in Herat and Kabul and building roads like the one connecting Delaram on the Kandahar-Herat highway to Zaranj near the Iranian border. The name of an intelligence service which would be upset by the loss of strategic depth in Afghanistan due to Indian presence is left as an exercise to the reader. This is a war against India by a brutal enemy with a nefarious goal — one which Christine Fair, Maria Mishra, Asra Q. Nomani and Martha Nussbaum have not emphasised in their articles. As for Deepak Chopra, we only hope that he writes a book thicker than Why Is God Laughing? so that we can use it to deflect bullets during the next terrorist attack. The writer is an engineer living in the US. He blogs at varnam.org